


you were a home that i wanted to grow up in

by Aris



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexuality, C-PTSD, Character Study, Complex Post Traumatic-Stress Disorder, Dissociation, Fluff and Angst, Growing Up Together, Homophobia, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Oikawa-centric, Past Child Abuse, Relationship Study, Suicide Attempt, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-08-31 14:23:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8581915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: How Oikawa grows up, and the spaces Iwaizumi fills.
  
    
    He used to be honest with his therapists, when he was younger, and he’d tell them [...] how he’d stack big, big books under his window so he could strain up on his tip toes on them, sway half his chest out of the frame and think about falling. He said he was hoping aliens might abduct him, take him away, and they don’t call him silly but ask him what he thinks would happen if he did jump out, if he hit the floor.
  
  
    He always knew if he hit the stone stairs below his room he would die





	1. im a house with no windows

Oikawa likes stars.

At reading hour, he tidies his desk the best he can and gathers his pencils into his JAXA pencil case, runs his fingers over the familiar logo. The teacher lets his group go first to the library, and Oikawa abandons the friends at his table to rush into the oversized book section, a dimly lit ex storage room stocked with books of holo-covers and textured bookmarks. He can’t make out the titles very well, can’t quite reach the switch for any extra lighting, but he knows the book he is searching for like the back of his hand.

It is heavy, bloated with A4 double pages of dark space and tiny pin prints of dazzling light, and Oikawa still struggles to angle it out from the metallic blue shelves, totes it out of the room like a holy book coming to rest on the alter. The spine is comforting and worn on his fingers, and he relishes the _swoosh!_ of air as he sets it down at a reading table. He is the first one back with his spoils, others talking with the teacher and picking up books with bright colours or silly faces or big words they yearn to understand.

He skips the sum of contents, lets his hand fall into well-known grooves either side of the book and skims until he sees nothing. Two pages of blackness. The next page, he knows, says black holes, has supernova written in purple and atom in red which directs him to a vocabulary list below. But he doesn’t turn the page, and he doesn’t read neat little definitions of words he’s ached into his brain during nights of reading under the covers with the silly alien torch his aunt bought him. Rather, he stares into the faded dark print of that double page spread, catches the reflection of the cheap orange glow of the ceiling fixtures. It’s not truly black, not truly all consuming.

It makes him wonder.

Oikawa likes stars, but he loves black holes.

  


Black holes can be any size.

His mother smooths down the flicking edge of his fringe, smiles at him in fragments when he can look at her. Her touch is always timid, a little removed, like a parody of the real thing she’d picked up from watching muted movies and TV shows on LED screens. Her hands smell a little like the alcohol gel parked next to their bathroom sink. After touching anything, she scrubs her hands red. Oikawa counts the bloody dots on their hand towels when he brushes his teeth.

“Your hair’s a little pretty, isn’t?” She says, more to herself than to Oikawa, “Maybe we should get it cut. Be a little more manly, yes? Like Hajime-san. He’s a strong boy,” Oikawa hates haircuts, hates the way his mum’s friends nails dig into the back of his neck and how she’s always laughing fully, openly about something silly Oikawa did, story courtesy of his mother. She builds him up, such a tall boy, going to be so handsome, a heart breaker, and he’s athletic - but oh dear, he’s so childish, you know? Still sleeps in alien t shirts and calls his friends -chan. And then they chat with words like sandpaper, grinding him back into the ground; he’s a little air headed, so clingy with his friends, always reading those space books.

It makes him anxious, when she chants out these little liners. What if he doesn’t stay tall forever? What if he isn’t handsome when he grows up? What if he can’t play volleyball anymore? And he doesn’t want to break girls hearts, he wants to watch old alien movies with Iwaizumi and catch cicadas in his back garden in the light of a warm, glowing sunset that can only mean Iwaizumis mums famous summer Unagi. She always cooks it just right, and sets Oikawa a place every time even if he says he can’t stay - and she thinks he can’t see it, but he does, the way adults look at him twice. Whisper when his mother will whisk him down a street to the local shops.

“I like my hair,” Oikawa tells his mum, and she cups his cheeks with lukewarm palms.

“I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about my son,” She answers right back, voice shaky in something that isn’t quite concern, “So we’ll get it cut, okay? Be a good boy.”

She hardly ever touches him anymore. He thinks it’s one of those adult quirks that they never explain properly to him, but he feels dirty when she instantly reaches for the tap of the kitchen sink.

“Okay,” he agrees.

The smallest black holes can be the size of an atom, with ten times the mass. They form at the creation of a universe.

  


Oikawa can use a lot of words to describe Iwaizumi. But he prefers moments, like;

It’s midsummer. Oikawa is wearing shorts his mother had pulled down the hem of several different times, ensuring they touched at the bony protrusions of his knees. He’s not allowed to wear shirts like they volleyball players on at the Nationals yet, but a white shirt with the number 01 on it is almost enough. He thinks it’s supposed to be for basketball, but it was a birthday gift from his mother that wasn’t just money or a book, and she had even half remembered his favourite player was number one - the captain and his amazing serves - but that might just be a coincidence. He doesn’t think they sell number eight shirts.

Everybody wants to be number one, and he slams the volleyball down into the grass of Iwaizumi’s garden so hard he knocks over a bucket a few feet away on the rebound. His friend doesn’t mind. But he is hot, sweating through his shirt, and he remembers police officers commenting on his scanty pyjamas being chilly at the police station and his mother’s shaky, shaky digits smoothing over the fabric again and again. He remembers a vest top - daddy’s number one.

Sweat itches at his back.

“Do you think we’ll be captains, Iwa-chan?” He asks airily, retrieving the ball. His friend looks up from rightening the bucket, hands muddy from the ground. Unlike him, he gets to wear shorts and shirts appropriate for the weather, and his thighs are dusted with smudges of pencil from Oikawa’s over enthusiastic drawing earlier.

“There’s only one captain in volleyball, Tooru,” He replies, frowning. Oikawa watches that little crease in between his eyes. It’s very Iwiazumi, that frown, so distanced from his mother’s counterpart frown.

“When I become captain, I’ll make you my second in command!” He proclaims, throwing the ball at Iwaizumi’s unprepared hands. But he’s fast, like always, and the crease disappears as he pitches the sloppily aimed ball back at Oikawas smiling face. It misses by a mile, and they both laugh freely as it knocks against his garden fence, almost ricocheting back at the poor, old bucket.

Iwaizumi bumps his shoulder into Oikawa’s on his way past to retrieve it once again, warm and close and friendly. It feels like a summer breeze, warm sand between his toes.

“As long as we still play together, I don’t care.” He doesn’t question that Oikawa said ‘ _when_ ’ and not _‘if’_. Doesn’t doubt for a second. Sunlight shines through his fingers, relaxed at his side.

Oikawa is happy.

  


This happiness is brief, and he finds that the sun sets too quickly when you get older. There are hours crammed into the day that ache his eyes to consider, but when they happen it is so quick he’s unsure if he were there at all. The bell rings, signalling the end of the day, and Oikawa blinks and blinks until Iwaizumi appears in the classroom door.

When Iwaizumi bumps their shoulders, he apologies, now. Maybe his footing went wrong or Oikawa drifted too far left, drawn to him as the moon to the sun, but it doesn’t mean anything. There’s a lack of quiet comfort between them, and it’s a void Oikawa cannot traverse with worlds alone. It’s a hanging question, the space between their skin as they walk, as they play. Oikawa is not entirely sure he wants the answer, wouldn’t know how to ask for it.

But. Oikawa is smart, has been the subject of praise and academic adoration for years now, and he knows how to piece together a puzzle. Despite his demeanour, there are few people he allows skin to skin contact with, his coats and jackets and shirt protective layers for others. His list is small: his mother, and Iwaizumi. His mother peels the skin from her hands with harsh disinfectants after so much as a brush against him, washes away with red the feel of his skin against hers. She used to hide it, at first, but he’s been watching blood twirl down the drain so, so often.

One person on his list cannot bear his skin. It makes sense, in a sick little way, that Iwaizumi would feel the same. He used to pick up sticks and catch bugs with his hands, and he’d moan when his mum made him run them under the tap before dinner – and, and he’d pick up that muddy bucket Oikawa knocked over, would lay down plasters on Oikawa’s burst open skin. And now, Iwaizumi cleans his hand delicately after eating, rubbing the stickiness of sweets from his fingers, scowling at slight stains on his jackets. He cares, because he realises that dirty things are not good things.

And Oikawa is so filthy it crawls beneath his epidermis, sends thick, tar like chills down his exposed back, slipping to the next notch in a way that feels awfully like a large, calloused hand he wants to forget. Oikawa is a dirty thing, a bad thing, and Iwaizumi has probably realised that Oikawa, therefore, is not a good thing. 

So the touching stopped. 

It makes sense.

And that is why now Oikawa finds that, unlike his mother, he cannot bleed the dirt away.

  


Hospitals make him feel small. Like he’s a child again. He doesn’t like them.  


This is not a revelation to anyone, and Iwaizumi is calling him an idiot for overworking himself the moment Oikawa can open his eyes long enough to focus properly. They had given him something for the pain, he realises later, and it makes his limbs feel like concentrated gravity, sucking them down onto bed sheets. He knows what’s happening a split second before it does, and he’s sinking before he can pull himself up, quicksand scrambling at his nails. He’s glad only Iwaizumi and his mother are there, because he can’t stop the helplessness bubbling up in his chest, the brace on his knee feeling like the grip of a hand dragging him down onto his back. There’re no stars on the ceiling. Why would there be stars on the ceiling? 

He panics. Someone grabs his arm, and he curls up against the top of the curtains surrounding a bed. Someone’s arm is being held on the bed, and there’s shaking, shaking that like the whole universe is cracking into pieces around - around - who?

It doesn’t matter.

There’s cotton burying him. Someone is talking nearby, but not at him, at someone else. He doesn’t exist. He can’t hear the words and it all feels too loud, right behind him, all around him. It’s loud, loud, and somebody is hushing and the harsh s drills into his brain. When he reaches out, he can’t feel the walls, can’t see a single star though he feels like he should.

It doesn’t make sense, and something somewhere hurts.

Something, somewhere else is wet with tears.

He doesn’t know what that means.

(Later, and he doesn’t know how long, Iwaizumi is the palest he’s ever seen him. Like someone sucked the warmth right out of him, bleached it to nothing. It might have been Oikawa, with how fair is skin is against his friends, and he wants to curl up deep where he can’t hurt anyone anymore. Where he can’t lose the love Iwaizumi gives him in this void that eats between his reality, that will crush anything that comes too close in an embrace so cold Oikawa’s heart goes numb keeping it all inside.

He’s not supposed to touch Iwaizumi, anymore, but he doesn’t let Oikawa pull his hand away. His mother watches with tight lips.)

  


Age sixteen, he realises he might be bisexual.

His eyes do not linger on men, he doesn’t seek out magazines or search terms, doesn’t picture anything wrapped up in bed alone. He daydreams in class, imagines holding hands and buying each other mochi and having inside jokes and bumping noses when they kiss and warmth so encompassing everything else feels empty in comparison. He wants to hold someone’s legs in his lap, wants to curl up tight in someone’s grip and wants someone to know him, truly, and for that someone to love him despite that. He might want that person to be a man.

Anything further makes him feel sick to the bones. His mother always asks after his girlfriends over dinner, meals turning ashy as he recites confessions and adoration and the names of girls in his class. She says she is happy he’s not just hanging around with ‘ _those volleyball boys’_ , because being around women is healthy. She watches him carefully for an agreement, every time. He feels her cold hands on his face, feels hair falling away from his younger neck. It’s a warning.

Her hairdresser friend says the word ‘ _fag_ ’ over tea, one day, when Oikawa is trying to sneak out through the front door and finds himself caught in the light leaking into the main room from the kitchen. It feels like a spotlight. His mother’s humming agreement and mocking laugh follows him all the way to Iwaizumis arms. 

And, _he’s not supposed to touch Iwaizumi anymore_ , because they’re older and it’s stranger and it can mean something. But there’s a raggedness to his edges, something unwinding in his chest, that prevents him from caring in that moment – Iwaizumi is awkward angles, covers his lack of confidence with sarcasm and anger. Oikawa falls right into him regardless. Always has. The elbow digging into his stomach is Iwaizumi’s and for that fact Oikawa doesn’t mind it so much, pulls it out from under him as his own shoulders tremble, winds it round his own waist. Iwaizumi only tugs him closer, shushes him when sounds he barely recognizes as his own escape his lips, and Oikawa lets himself bury his tears into Iwaizumi’s volleyball jacket, the textured thread of the teams logo scratching against where his hands clench.

He doesn’t know how he should feel, has always known how his mother felt, but something about that word –

_You... you - you faggot! You did this to our son –_

Later, Iwaizumi wipes his cheeks with the edges of his jacket, skims his thumb against eye bags. Murmurs things Oikawa has read so many times on internet forums, words that would mean nothing from anyone else, would be worthless if it weren’t for the swelling mess that is his heart. He has the distinct impression he doesn’t deserve them, fits them strangely against himself, but Iwaizumi holds them there for him, pushes them deeply and for long enough for them to stick. To cement. And his hands hold him so nicely, so warmly, that Oikawa can only cry again and again and again until the sun rises and the neighbour’s dog barks behind its gate.

He wishes that this was his always.

  


Whenever he finds himself alone despite his best efforts at avoiding it, he cannot help but wonder when Iwaizumi will leave him. Because there is always a limit, always a timer ticking away or a boundary waiting to be crossed that will signal the end up ahead – please slow down, mind your head, sharp drop up ahead. He is so full sometimes, of decaying matter and an ocean of badness he cannot describe, he spills out. Spills out onto Iwaizumi in tears he excuses and jokes that cut too close to soft bone, hounds him with things he has been asked to let go off. But his claws just won’t retract, dig deeper in vulnerable marrow when he pulls desperately at them. He wants to cut them off, scrape them out from under his nails.

And then he’s empty, and he likes it a little better that way. Even if Iwaizumi gets a little concerned sometimes. Because, one day, he won’t be concerned, and he won’t be there, and this emptiness will keep Oikawa full in his stead.

  


Tidying his room, he finds a torch with the lenses shaped like a little alien head.

He cradles it, catches his eyes on the worn and dry hands wrapped around such a tiny object. Imagines when his younger hands had held it, when he needed both of them to keep it up right and flick the switch at the same time. He doesn’t like to think of his smaller hands holding things, remembers hot breath on his forehead and chokes when he presses his head into his hanging curtains.

Dust trickles down his throat, and he wonders if this was his father’s fault. Because a lot of things are his fault, but it doesn’t feel right to pin the guilt he feels now on the man. They never moved - him and his mother. They stayed in the house. In the same room. It’s hard to sleep, sometimes, and he stays up and he cries and he thinks:

He wants to kiss Iwaizumi. He wants to kiss his best friend and thread their fingers together, and he wants to take him out to places he knows Iwaizumi likes and he wants to hold him, and be held, and he wants to pepper his face with tiny presses of his lips. He wants to cook with him forever, and do their work together forever, and he wants to walk with him forever, whether they may be going or coming from.

And –

And he’s eighteen soon. He has always wanted things, selfishly, sexual things that sicken him to the depths of his stomach. But soon he will be expected to act on them, like everyone else, and it’s not like everyone doesn’t already think he has. He can’t picture himself there, can’t align his desires with the only thing he can relate to sex – pain, shame, fingers pressed to his lips in a mocking hush. Moments and sensations he only recalls in brief memories he shuts down before they fully form, and it’s always enough to have him spitting out bile into the sink, digging nails into his inner thighs. But somewhere along the way, that became normal, and it’s in moments like this, alone, that the true horror gets to him.

Stifles him, like a hand across his mouth.

(The other always in his hair, at first)

He wonders if that was the event horizon, the police cars. His mother’s tears. The shirt in the trash can the next morning. And since then, he’s been dragged steadily nearer the singularity at the heart of his form, the single atom that devours pieces of him in a slow rot. He cannot escape after the horizon, a barrier he was forced across without his consent, and now he knows time around a black hole is slow, warped and sluggish. He knows because something died those years ago, something integral to his being, and every day he can crack open his eyes is an exaggerated second in the brief moments leading to his complete consumption. A mockery of life, imagined existence in his borrowed time. He is already dead. 

It would explain why his chest hurts so, so much out of nowhere for reasons he can never place. Why he feels so hollow when he’s not filling the space with words. The torch is small in his hands gangly hands. He wants to crush it.

He puts it back under his mattress

  


It’s a Tuesday when he wakes up and nothing is crushing his crumbling ribs into the bedsheets below him. His bones are – empty. Like a birds.

He feels alright.

When he moves his limbs, they obey, cut through the air like wings and are so beautifully light he chokes up a little in the morning light. He loves days like this. He can smile, and he doesn’t root around in his mind to do it, doesn’t have to conjure it out like a discount magic show – it’s real, and instant, and alien to the one he nurses in bathroom mirrors and phone screens. And in between smiling, he can concentrate in class, can tease Iwaizumi without the dread of abonnement building in his chest, without having to watch every miniscule facial expression to ensure that Iwaizumi knows it’s a joke; because of course he does. No one abandons childhood friends with a moment of unreciprocated humour, and Oikawa is always like this. He eats lunch, and brushes bare skin to his friends without thinking about moments alone with a blank faced police officer. And he can float through the rest of the day on cloud nine, setting perfectly at practice and laughing it off when he doesn’t. Mistakes are normal. Mistakes are expected. Everyone makes mistakes. 

He cooks with his mother, doesn’t feel dread gorging at every ridge of his throat with the second glances she gives him when he’s not facing her. She doesn’t hate her son, he isn’t dirty, his homework is easy, and he’s going to be happy _forever._

But, he also hates these days.

Because he will wake up the next day, or the next week, and he won’t be happy anymore. These days show to him the life of a normal person, with clean skin and strong bones and real smiles. The capabilities of everyone else, the qualities so out of reach of his stretching arms they may as well be floating in space. This is who Oikawa could be, the ideal him, and it’s so horribly cruel he has to live it, so fucking unfair he crushes the skin of his thighs between his perfectly manicured nails, revels in the ooze of blood and plasma. He didn’t choose this, and he shelters a deep hatred of those around him who can get up in the morning like it’s nothing, who don’t have to work twice as hard to function, to cover up the fact he can’t function. It’s jealously. Bitter and strong.

These people don’t lose themselves to volleyball and homework. They don’t fight to keep their identity under the onslaught of things they love and things they just need to do – they persist through it, they exist separately to their actions because they don’t need to invest their energy in watching and flinching and crying and practicing their laugh in the reflection of their powered down laptop. 

It's a Wednesday when he wakes up, and he hates them, and he hates himself, and the good days are never, ever worth it.


	2. you're the flowers on the front porch

“I don’t understand how I didn’t notice,” 

There’s no little crease on between his eyes, no space Oikawa can press his thumb too, can righten with a little pressure. Iwaizumis expression is blank, an impression of frost upon a gargoyles features. His hair is messy, but it causes a downward tug at his lips to notice this isn’t his usual style - this is something worn, this is something other than alarm clocks and that streak of sun that always shines brightly over his bed covers from the broken tilt of his blinds. This is dull hair, styled with the sticky blood only Iwaizumi can see on his hands.

Oikawa doesn’t know how to tell him that Iwaizumu wasn’t supposed to notice. That there was nothing to notice, because this is - this is Oikawa, through and through. This is always.

As long as he can remember, he has had a backup plan. An option B. A just-in-case. He used to be honest with his therapists, when he was younger, and he’d tell them how he’d leave his body when it hurt too much and stare at the plastic glowing stars pinned on his ceiling above his bed. Float with them. How he’d stack big, big books under his window so he could strain up on his tip toes on them, sway half his chest out of the window and think about falling. He said he was hoping aliens might abduct him, take him away, and they don’t call him silly but ask him what he thinks would happen if he did jump out, if he hit the floor.

He always knew if he hit the stone stairs below his room he would die. He tells them he wouldn’t fall. 

And when he does get older, and these sickening realisations of what happened sink it bit by bit for years, his plans change. He won’t die anymore if he hits the stairway below his window, he’s tall and tough and buys mens razors, tugs down hard on his ties - tests how much weight they can support. Just in case. And Iwaizumi has become so much more, so real, and Oikawa finds himself saving notes on his phone, embarrassing words that are cliche, and he hates that his pain is so ordinary, that a suicide note can’t be something special.

_I’m sorry_

_You really meant the most to me Iwa-chan_

_thanks for all the milkbread_

_I know we joked a lot about running away together, but can we?_

He deletes them all, lying on the gym floor one night, chest heaving and knee aching and three sent texts assuring Iwaizumi he’s at home. He’s in bed. Its sweat cooling on his face, not tears.

It’s not sweat in this moment, though, and now there are dark, sad crinkles on Iwaizumis forehead he never wants to lay eyes on again. His friends’ hands tremble as they touch his arm, and Oikawa thinks back to stupid alien band aids from the corner shop and a failed jump serve. Wants to catch the memory to his chest, saviour it there, gather it up like a silken blanket and forget to let go. His skin has always been darker, a warm stability rooted in the shade which burrows deep in his veins. 

Welcome home, it’s okay, you’re alright, it speaks to him.

Over wires and bandages and stiff hospital sheets, Iwaizumi touches his heart and it hurts so fucking badly, so much worse than years of defense mechanisms and carefully constructed personalities. He stutters over sentences he can’t say, swallows back the dryness in his throat from pure oxygen and guilt. How do you describe a void?

There’s a cough from the patient in the bed next to him, hidden from his sight by a pale curtain. Yet, Iwaizumi glances side-wards, seems to catch someones eye beyond the reaches of the plastic rail. He doesn’t apologize, doesn’t draw back from their tangled embrace, and their skin melts together beneath white light as Oikawa’s vision blurs with salt. He says:

“I want to understand, I’m not angry at you for not telling me. These things happen.”

He says,

“You just can’t do it again,”

(When Oikawa is discharged, the bed next to his is empty, its sole owner never having interacted with him, only Iwaizumi on that first night. He remembers;

No one has ever seen a black hole. Only the things which are drawn to it.)

  


“Do you feel it affects your day-to-day ability to function?”

His mouth is dry. He had smiled as disarmingly as possible when he first entered, had complimented the potted plant to the side of the desk even though in all honestly it had been rather under-watered. Sitting, he had been careful, too - aversion techniques. Staring at his knees, picking at his jeans, playing with his shoelace. He keeps his hands in his lap, doesn’t hold them together too hard. Keeps his posture open, relaxed, and yet –

She’s still writing things down. Like there’s something to note about his intrinsic existence here, in this office. It annoys him not to be infallible.

“No,” He tells her, “I don’t think so,” and he smiles. Again. She never smiles back, always initiates emotions at the end of the sessions. Like she has it squared away somewhere on a to-do list.

“But you attempted to... end your life, correct?”

“It appears so,”

“You tried to kill yourself, intentionally, yes?” She prompts again.

“Yes.” 

“And you expressed the desire to be dead to several hospital staff upon admission?”

“I...” He doesn’t remember. Really. “I don’t want to talk about this,” 

“When will you want to? Next week? In our next session? Or never?”

“Never,” He answers before he can hold himself back, and suddenly he’s staring at his legs. Fidgeting with his hands. She doesn’t write it down. He feels similar to pigs in a documentary he watched with Iwaizumi on the meat industry. They screamed and cried and bled from cuts in their throats, a voice over informing them they couldn’t feel a thing over their twitching, bloody forms. They peeled the skin from their legs, nerves jerking their limbs, and Oikawa had asked Iwaizumi to change the channel.

He wishes he could change the channel, now.

“... Have you ever attempted to hurt yourself?”

“No.”

“This includes hitting, scratching, pinching, biting, putting yourself in dangerous situations... it is very broad and a common behaviour. Completely understandable and normal in the circumstances.”

“I don’t hurt myself,” He greets his teeth together, lets his frustration clench together his jaw. He lost control of the conversation a while ago to her quick fire questions, the way she refuses to engage in his social behaviours.

“Your mother mentioned you have a knee injury you regularly strain. Is that intentional?” 

“It’s not. I can’t avoid accidents in volleyball, so sometimes it gets a little banged up,” He follows it with a short laugh that he knows will fall on unresponsive ears - they both know he doesn’t mean it. Oikawa is surprised his mother even noticed after the initial incident, she had never commented on his limping or constant visits to the freezer for ice packs; or rather, an exasperated Iwaizumi’s visits to their freezer for ice packs. He always grabs a towel, too, to lay between the skin and his knee, gets mad when Oikawa neglects to do it himself. It stings just as badly as his mother’s negligence. 

“Do these accidents occur more or less when you feel disconnected to the world around you?”

He misses Iwaizumi.

(This is where they lose.

This is where his jump serves aren’t enough, where his knee bites at the bones either side and late night practice and early morning runs and frustrated tears into empty gyms mean nothing.

This is where Oikawa loses the one thing he swore not to. 

Again.)

  


They play a last practice match together, as a team.

Mattsun claps him on the back like he can see the softening of Oikawa’s callouses, like he knows muscle is turning soft and fleshy beneath his skin. His hand turns red when he runs into a serve, his knee aches beneath him, and this is the pain he has worked so hard for. The only pain he is allowed to inflict upon himself – controlled, healthy. Pain which others envy. Pain that is celebrated.

Oikawa gathers his team close, loses something in the edges of his smile as he pushes Yahaba into his new, offical captaincy. He’d been the sort-of captain since they lost to Karasuno, but there’s a little more ceremony to it when Oikawa hands over a shirt, mock curtsies, announces Yahaba as the new number one to the sweaty faces surrounding them.

(He was tired of it, after all. Being number one.)

Faintly, he realises he never wanted this to end – this team, his time at Aobajosai, the warmness between them all he can bury himself into when his physical home is cold and clean. No one smells like alcohol gel when they gather into a group hug, Iwaizumu’s burning skin clamping heavily on his neck, and they laugh loudly over something Oikawa must have said, because Makki is smiling at him through smudged eyes.

The second years are all grins and energy as they change; bugging Oikawa and Iwaizumi about their scholarship offers and plans for university, Makki and Mattsun already quietly establishing they weren’t taking volleyball to a professional level. Their unthinking assumptions about their skill, their belief that scholarships will just fall into their unprepared laps, reminds Oikawa of Iwaizumis words all those years ago. It thaws something around his heart strings, and he finds himself ruffling Yahab’s hair with a little more affection than he’d usually care to show, too much smile and not enough smirk. 

His teammate doesn’t say anything about it, acceps the affection as it comes - but Iwaizumi lets Oikawa rest his head on his shoulder, later, when they’re alone in the changing room and staring at the lockers they’d been stuffing their uniform in since their very first day here. Iwaizumi had pushed Oikawa into the locker room, bumped their shoulders too harshly, and the edges of the open door had bruised Oikawa’s back for a week after the collision. 

It had been nice, he reflects, and suddenly he is tearing up because he never gets to put his clothes into that locker again. No – because, he doesn’t get to walk back from practices with Iwaizumi, Makki and Mattsun. He doesn’t get to laugh with them behind a net, crash into their form rooms, steal their lunches or buy them sucrosy foods from the convenience store they’ve been passing for the last three years.

Iwaizumi is brings a hand to his elbow, holding it gently but absolutely. Their dynamic has been shifting ever since his knee gave out, first catastrophically and now slowly, like maple syrup slipping down his tongue. It’s sweet, and it has begun to catch against his throat when he thinks too hard about it – how _close_ they have become. How different their intimacy is to that of their childhood. Warmer. Slower. 

His grip on Iwaizumi’s shirt tightens, an unidentified wave of emotion flooding down his arms, playing at his fingertips in a dizzy numbness. He feels – hot, his skin too thick all of a sudden, and a gaping awareness of how much time he has spent here, in this town, and here, in Iwaizumi’s arms, floods him. He’s gasping out onto a broad shoulder, feels an uncoiling of muscle beneath his forehead – something wet dripping down between his eyes. It’s salty when it runs down his lips, and Oikawa can’t bring himself to chase the taste away as a reassuring pressure settles down around him.

  


Oikawa accepts his scholarship offer – the best one. He drags himself up at late hours to fret over his decision, dragging nails at the heavy weights under his eyes. The university in question is Tokyo-based, not too far from home, but that isn’t the root of Oikawa’s self-prescribed insomnia.

Iwaizumi is going to a different university.

They had talked about it, soft words Oikawa felt against his skin more than heard. He didn’t let Iwaizumi get away with playing the distance card, forced his eyes to meet his, made sure every sentence was real and true. Selfishly hoped it would be enough to make Iwaizumi stay with him, drop his own scholarship for something lesser, something closer to Oikawa. It wasn’t what he really wanted, for Iwaizumi to come too close, get caught in his gravitational pull and ruin his whole life following Oikawa. 

Regardless, the fact he’d briefly entertained the idea of guilting Iwaizumi into choosing his university spikes hard at the back of his skull, where the bone is soft. It’s an awful lot like the thoughts he has sometimes, the ones he tries to tell himself aren’t his own. Aren’t who he is. But he can’t deny his own mind, and it hurts so much he has to be so self-centred. So _greedy._

( _… you’re so greedy for attention, aren’t you, Tooru? So greedy for me…_ )

It’s just that he feels too free without Iwaizumi. Like he could float off, lost, caught in with whatever it is that wraps us his thoughts so neatly not even he can shakily interpret them. He needs something solid, corporal, to weigh him down in reality, and less and less often does he think of stars, but more of Iwaizumi’s laugh when it comes from deep within, his smile in the dim light of his bedside table. How warm he always is to rival Oikawa’s coldness. 

He’s not sure how he is expected to live without that. How he’s supposed to smile on the happy days if Iwaizumi isn’t there to see it. It’s a dangerously hollow sensation, picturing a life without him. It hurts like roots in his lungs, like flowers choking his airways, like petals spilling out into his fingers. And his brain is stupid, because there is never a single day he doesn’t anxiously worry at the idea of Iwaizumi leaving him, doesn’t flinch back from the biting of his own imaginations, but it still aches with the same intensity as if the thought were new. Original. As if the idea is somehow, atrociously impossible.

But it has never been impossible, and it’s so frightening a concept he scrapes at his ears to block it out.

Oikawa is an irreplaceable setter. He is a master strategist on the court, reads moves before the owner themselves, can calculate the exact pressure he needs to exert and at what angle to get the ball precisely where it needs to be at precisely the right moment. He can pick out weakness in the slightest movements, has been picking his own out for far too long not to recognise it in others, and predicts the seconds leading up to that weakness becoming their opponents downfall. 

He is not, however, an irreplaceable person. 

His solar plexus drops down into his pelvis when he observes Iwaizumi with others. It’s a stupid jealously, a childish one, that curdles everything saccharine and fattening inside him, rots it to a teeth grinding bitterness. He’s afloat whenever Iwaizumi smiles that genuine smile at anyone but him, when he touches the arms of star struck first years with a casual familiarity Oikawa yearns to cordon off and reserve only for himself. He has safety measures for these occasions – smiles so fake the decays drips down from his teeth, arms that wrap carefully on Iwaizumi’s shoulders, just the right amount of stiffness for him to know Oikawa will not melt into him in that moment. He wants others to know Iwaizumi is his, is off limit, that Iwaizumi may touch them but don’t they dare touch him back.

It’s not a healthy behaviour. Iwaizumi always chastises him. Oikawa doesn’t know how to make it stop, can’t halt that crawling fear of abandonment rearing its head the second Iwaizumi isn’t utterly focused on him; he is replaceable, so easy to exchange, and the measures that fear drives him to only choke him further on his own tail – push Iwaizumi further. The attention of others just isn’t the same, and Oikawa has tried so hard to fill these gaping places inside him with compliments and adoration that never feel like his to take, has beat himself within inches of exhaustion for praise that, ultimately, will mean nothing to him. There are so few things that mean anything to him anymore that everything else just falls through the gaps of his bleeding hands. It could be narcissism, but he’s not sure narcissists hate themselves this much.

His therapist said it wasn’t narcissistic to acknowledge your strengths. It’s healthy to be aware of your weaknesses too, so he lists them:

Oikawa is good at crushing people into fine dust. 

He is bad at keeping that dust between his thinning fingers.

  


Objects are not sucked into a black hole; rather, a black hole is so dense it curves and distorts the space around it. Whatever is in that curve is caught beyond the event horizon. No known particle or phenomenon in the universe has enough energy to climb out of this wallow in space time.

Iwaiumi, Oikawa notes, looks rather tired.

Above them, the sky is a watercolour grey, long clouds stretching out in extended shadows, sharp lines defining them as if sketched there. Spring is mounting steadily, the crisp breath of winter fading out to give way to the thick headiness of pollen and pale blossoms, cloying the air with a syrupy sweetness. Oikawa enjoys sweet things; the delicate way in which sugar melts into his tongue, the almost painful spike at his taste buds, how its flavour persist in his mouth and slicks at the gaps between his teeth, gathers at dips in his tongue. It coats everything so fully, that he can’t help but hold it a little too long in his mouth, especially if it’s the artificial sweetness of milk bread from the big store at the centre of town, the one Iwaizumi always buys Oikawa some from with an eye roll and a disparaging comment.

Spring is a different kind of a sweet to bread, and right now it feels more bitter than saccharine. His jaw aches with it.

Iwaizumi’s lawn is a touch on the side of over grown, and where Oikawa sits long patches of grass reach up to embrace the denim of his legs, tight buds knocking against his ankles in the breeze. Next to him, Iwaizumi is staring out at the neat squaring of the punnet layout framing the shared meadow space laid out in front of them, plots of soil left to wild flowerings or tilled into neat lines of vegetables. In the dim light of the fading day, shadows catch so handsomely at the line of his jaw, the furrow of his brow, that Oikawa doesn’t have it in him to tear away his gaze. He can read the relaxation in curves of his body, how he slouches into the wall of his home, one leg brought to his chest and the other hanging down from the steps, inches from Oikawa’s and radiating warmth.

Oikawa likes that he knows what a content Iwaizumi looks like. He burns the image into his mind, keeps his mouth to avoid spilling bleach on the delicate colouring of Iwaizumi’s skin catching the rays of a setting sun beneath a rain cloud. It’s so bright, a whiteness that floods all with a clarity fogged with tenderness – and Oikawa can feel it, really feel it like fresh water spilling into his lungs. He’s so utterly in love with Iwaizumi the marrow of his ribs leaks our trying to restrain how _full_ he is in his presence, how wonderfully alive every cell in his body is at the mere suggestion of his presence. At the tiniest hint of affection. This is the kind of fullness he wishes he could spill, the kind he wishes to paint Iwaizumi with, mark him with – this, and not the thick, dark jealous he oozes like a poison, the one he can’t contain. 

“Tooru,” Oikawa head jolts, his eyes hurrying to refocus away from the spot where they’d been blanking staring a hole into Iwaizumi’s neck. He’s faced towards him now, head titled away from the garden. The use of his first name doesn’t go unnoticed, and there’s a definite crack in his thoughts as something gives way inside his chest.

“Where do you go, when you look like that?” He asks, and it’s soft, too soft to be for anyone else. Inexplicably, tears itch at Oikawa’s eyes. 

“Nowhere, Iwa-chan.” His voice hitches, betrays him, and suddenly Iwaizumi is close around him, reaching out to encompass his shoulders, his arms. Cold limbs that can’t help but shake with the prospect of an emotion Oikawa can’t express, won’t express. He’s not, he’s not -

“Oikawa?

He lets himself be drawn in, lets Iwaizumi brace himself around him so Oikawa can tangle his fingers in his shirt and lean back on the solid press of a thigh. It’s nothing like the medications he swallows down, the two toned capsules that drag against his throat and blur his vision – but Iwaizumi is better than drugs he’s half convinced don’t work. He’s familiar, surrounding, a home where Oikawa lacks one. He doesn’t think he’s ever going to be able to give this up, no matter the words his mother spits into the sink, rubs into his skin with an alcohol that burns at his nose.

Large hands rub at his back, avoid the descent of his spine, skim around the areas Oikawa can’t stand to be touched in, and it’s so careful, so considerate that Oikawa can’t hold back his next sob, loud and wracking and a painful discord to the gentle day around them. Iwaizumi is murmuring to him, bite sized insults and soothing nothings that lull at the brokenness he feels in his veins, the glass shards lodged in the caverns of his heart. He can only clutch back, dig his nails into the cotton mix and try to heave breathes in through a blocked nose; noisy, and messy, and ugly.

It takes a while for him to calm down, the suddenness of the episode no reprieve to its length – it drags out, in hiccups and chest pains and the fading light around them. Street lights begin to glow a dull red as they switch on, casting a bloody faded out quality to darkening air around them. Oikawa finally pulls away when he can breathe in without a stutter in his lungs, without his lips trembling over nothing. Iwaizumi is there, pushing Oikawa’s hair away from his face where a few locks have grown wet with tears. His breath lights up the moisture on Oikawa’s cheeks, makes him blink up back into his Iwaizumi’s eyes, his own feeling too sore and dry. 

“You cry too much,” 

“Worried, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa’s voice comes out strained and a touch too quiet, vowels almost inaudible, but Iwaizumi stills smiles wryly at the coy tone.

“About you? Always,” It’s frighteningly sincere, and Oikawa is too tired, and too drowsy, and too emotionally drawn out to think about the kiss he drops at the edge of Iwaizumi’s lips. A small one, like they give each other sometimes on their foreheads, but he doesn’t want to stretch that far up – and oh, _oh._

Iwaizumi is staring now, his arms tightening on Oikawa’s shoulders like he knows he wants to run. A heaviness is sinking steadily into his abdomen, crushing butterflies into his stomach lining.

“Oikawa…” He asks, “Oikawa, what was that?” And he’s reaching forward to touch at Oikawa’s jaw, keeps his flickering eyes up to meet with his own. Oikawa opens his mouth to answer, but nothing comes out, staring dumbly at Iwaizumi instead, the distinct sensation of falling suddenly whistling past his ears. He wonders if this is the part where Iwaizumi leaves him. The end of a childhood story book, dust on a faded cover.

“Trashykawa! Did you just kiss me?” Iwaizumi’s voice comes out partially angrier this time, coming close to squeezing a flinch out of Oikawa with the force behind his words, his hand abrupt under his jaw. He doesn’t want to meet his eyes, but he can’t quite angle a look at anything else, finds himself sucked into the intensity of Iwaizumi around him. He might be shaking, his skin could be numb. He’s a lot of uncertainties. 

He nods.

Iwaizumi curses, idiot murmured under his breath, and then there’s another hand on Oikawa’s face, this one sweeping down his cheekbone, sticking against the dried salt there. The pads of his fingers are calloused, and Oikawa wants nothing more than to lean into them while the rest of his body seems to fall away from beneath him, a shuddering adrenaline rush at the realisation that _this is it_ , this is the culmination of everything he has tried to best to hide, tried to deny with volleyball practices and hand gels, thoughts he’s forcefully distanced himself while wrapped up in the confines of his bed. The breaking point. The event horizon.

Iwaizumi presses their lips together. Once.

Twice.

“ _Tooru,_ Tooru you _idiot,_ ” 

The third time, he kisses back.

  
  
  
  


  


  


He flicks through a pile of books he’s had under his desk for years, dirt cloying onto his fingers as he upsets the air around them. His smooths hands over a book of fairy tales, vaguely recalling being read them but only in the slightest of impressions. He sets it down to one side, sorting miscellaneous other books together into a pile of things to throw out or give away; whatever his mother finds more fitting. Iwaizumi takes up a lively presence in his room behind him, having offered to help him sort out his things for university – disapproving tilt to his eyebrows included as the moving out day drew closer and closer, like he knew Oikawa wasn’t making much progress on his own. Part of Oikawa wants to burn it all, his room, and scatter the ashes somewhere they won’t be recycled into the soil but – he can’t always get what he wants. He knows now, the difference between impulses he can never act on and wants he can gather up against himself. Treasure. 

A gleam catches his eye, and he glances down to behold a holographic cover catching a stray ray of sunlight, shining half-heartedly through a thick coating of dust. He brushes a finger gently at the spine, feels the crease of a dog eared page prickle at his skin. He slides his hand in, caresses the page open and sets down the open book in front of him, drinking in the sensationalized text announcing to him:

BLACK HOLES: THE VOID AT THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING

It’s heart stoppingly familiar.

“Hey, Trashykawa, you want me to get those stickers down?” Oikawa turns towards the interruption, to where Iwaizumi stands beside his bed, one hand pointing up at the glow in the dark stars tacked to the ceiling, illuminating weakly in the dim shadow cast across them.

Oikawa draws back to the open book, tracing his hand across the stark writing, staring into the faded ink. The nostalgia is almost enough to have this hands tremble - but when he finds it in himself to turn the page, to shut the heavy number away, he does so with a steady determination. The title page clicks shut.

“Yeah. Throw them out.”

He doesn’t need them anymore.

  
  
  
  
_Over their life time, if nothing is done to add further to a black hole, radiation will reduce the mass and energy of the phenomenon._  
  
_Eventually, it will completely evaporate._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title credit to: [you were a home that i wanted to grow up in](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab2HxJqpAnM)
> 
> *all edits have been made to part 1  
> * part 2 finishing touches tomorrow for spell checks
> 
> ah i stayed up the last few hours to finish this and i have a lecture in 6 hours but i needed to get this out before i started to hate it . im sorry for the minimal editing and the ooc characters and just My Writing i guess but i really hope this was at least somewhat enjoyable (?) . i feel bad about the ending but i want to emphasis that oikawa isn't Magically Cured and all his issues gone, just that with the right support mental illness can become more bearable . and that support never has to be romantic
> 
> thank you for taking the time to read my fic!!! have a lovely day and please please leave a comment if you have anything to say ^_^ 
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://killuay.tumblr.com)


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